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Old 04-13-2008, 04:45 PM
 
2 posts, read 9,204 times
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Hi there,
I'll be moving to the Pittsburgh area this August to start work in Monroeville. My wife and I both enjoy urban residential areas, and I was orinigally thinking of an apartment in the East End but have been turned off by the talk of high taxes in Pittsburgh proper.

Can someone clarify for me what my taxes would look like given a variety of options? Also if you could let me know what I might expect day to day life to be like in Monroeville or Edgewood as opposed to Shadyside/Squirrel Hill. I'm from out of state and don't understand all of this township, school district, etc. jazz.

1. Living in an apartment in pittsburgh proper (Shadyside/Squirrel Hill)
2. Buying a 150k condo or home in Pittsburgh proper.
3. Living in an apartment just outside of Pittsburgh (Edgewood near Regent Square). Or living in an apartment in Monroeville.
4. Buying a 150k condo or home in Monroeville/Edgewood.

Thanks for the help!
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Old 04-13-2008, 05:42 PM
 
Location: Pittsburgh, USA
3,131 posts, read 9,339,679 times
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If you live in the city income tax is 3%. Suburban income tax is usually 1%.

The average home in the area appreciated 1.2%. Real estate taxes can be 3% or more. If you want to own it's better to buy in Westmoreland County. Murrysville or North Huntingdon are worth looking at.

Monroeville has a wide variety of apartments with swimming pools, exercise rooms, depends what you like but you should be able to find it here in a reasonable price range. Also anything you need can be found right in Monroeville. There's others here who live in the city who can tell you about that.
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Old 04-13-2008, 11:37 PM
 
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You have four tax rates to consider: the local wage tax, the county property tax, local property tax, and school district property tax. You basically need to look all four up for each location you are considering, although for locations in Allegheny County you can look up all three property taxes at once on the Allegheny County website and get a total. So, for example, for 2007 in the City of Pittsburgh you would have had a 3% wage tax and a 2.941% total property tax (county, local, and school district combined). In Edgewood you would have had a 1% wage tax and 3.6001% total property tax. You can now apply those to your hypotheticals and get a total local tax amount.

By the way, Edgewood, particularly the Regent Square part, and Monroeville are quite different. Monroeville is a pretty traditional post-WWII suburb. Edgewood is a much older and closer-in neighborhood, and the parts in Regent Square are more or less indistinguishable from the City of Pittsburgh parts of Regent Square, or most of the East End in general.

And that does indeed make the non-Pittsburgh parts of Regent Square (Edgewood, Swissvale, or Wilkinsburg) attractive for some people who would would otherwise be looking at the East End of Pittsburgh, since you will pay a lower wage tax. The same is true in the neighborhood to the immediate North, what I call Park Place (parts of it are in Pittsburgh, and parts in Wilkinsburg).
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Old 04-14-2008, 06:37 AM
 
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Thanks for the responses fellas,

I really appreciate this resource! Your comments about Edgewood and Wilkinsburg got my attention. Lower wage taxes and closes proximity to the city are a plus. I'm curious to know more about the area. Is there public transport access to the city via buses etc? Also, are the areas generally safe and pleasant? Any pockets I should avoid, look closely into?

Thanks for any input.
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Old 04-14-2008, 07:21 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,889,722 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by somuchjackson View Post
Thanks for the responses fellas,

I really appreciate this resource! Your comments about Edgewood and Wilkinsburg got my attention. Lower wage taxes and closes proximity to the city are a plus. I'm curious to know more about the area. Is there public transport access to the city via buses etc? Also, are the areas generally safe and pleasant? Any pockets I should avoid, look closely into?

Thanks for any input.
Regent Square and Park Place are located near the East Busway, which means there are express bus routes which take you quickly to Downtown (and the other stops along the Busway, such as Shadyside). Other major bus routes include the 61A and 61B, which run along Forbes Avenue through Squirrel Hill, Oakland, and on to Downtown.

Regent Square is a very safe neighborhood (for whatever reason, all the communities right around Frick Park tend to be very safe). It is tough to get good statistics on Park Place since it is made up of two small pieces of much larger areas (the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which is statistically quite safe, and Wilkinsburg, which has had some crime issues), but I strongly suspect that it is also quite safe.

Pleasant is a somewhat subjective term, but I personally find these neighborhoods very pleasant. Just to give you a baseline, I first moved to Park Place when I was a grad student at Pitt because my roommate at the time found a good deal on an apartment there. When I met my wife we decided to move just down the street to an apartment in Regent Square, then we bought a house just a little farther down the street, and now we are buying a new house 2 1/2 blocks away from our current house. So, we obviously love the neighborhood.

Generally Regent Square and Park Place are what I would call "semi-urban": the neighborhoods are a mix of detached homes of all sizes (from cottages up to near mansions), a few rowhouses, and some small apartment buildings. The neighborhoods were built up over time so the styles are quite eclectic, although most of the architecture is from the late-Victorian and Craftsman periods. Many of the streets are lined with tall trees and some are paved with brick, the garages are usually on alleys, and many of the homes have front porches. People tend to stroll over to Frick Park, which is really a fantastic resource, and to "downtown" Regent Square, which has about two blocks of shops, restaurants, bars, offices, and an art house movie theater. There are a couple more smaller commercial areas along the border of Regent Square and Park Place, and there is a lot of commercial development happening along Penn Avenue, the north border of Park Place, which is where you will find fast food restaurants, big chain drug stores, several gas stations, and so on.

As for areas to seek out or avoid: Park Place is a bit more transitional than Regent Square and a little farther from the Park and the nice "downtown" area, but that is why rents in Regent Square tend to be a bit higher than in Park Place (note that apartments in Park Place might be listed under Regent Square, Point Breeze, Frick Park, East End, or so on--no one really knows what to call this small area). As you head east from Park Place or northeast from Regent Square, you will start getting into the more economically depressed areas of Wilkinsburg, although the area immediately adjacent to Park Place and Regent Square is starting to gentrify a bit, and there is a new project called "Peebles Square" in that area which may accelerate that process.

Due east from Regent Square is more of Edgewood (I'm going to just start calling the non-Regent Square parts of Edgewood "Edgewood"), which is generally nice, but the further you go into Edgewood the further you get from the Park and "downtown" area. I might note that not too long ago, Edgewood was a somewhat posh address and Regent Square was sort of a cheaper alternative. Now that walkable neighborhoods are back in style, Regent Square has arguably become a slightly more desirable area, although there are still some lovely homes in Edgewood.

Anyway, that is an overview. If it sounds attractive I'd definitely look into these areas, and if you want commentary on specific blocks I will do my best to help out.

Edit: By the way, I find the best way to understand Regent Square and Park Place is to use the "terrain" feature on Google Maps. So if you put in something like "Braddock and Hutchinson, Pittsburgh, PA", click on the "terrain" feature, and zoom in as far as you can, you should be looking at a roughly rectangular plateau just north of I-376 and east of Frick Park with a relatively dense street pattern on either side of Braddock Avenue. That is Regent Square (the dense street pattern is caused by the alleys--look for streets ending in "Way"). If you then follow Braddock Avenue as it curves up toward Penn past Forbes, you will see that a couple blocks worth of the Regent Square street pattern seems to be curving up with Braddock. That section past Forbes along Braddock is Park Place.

Last edited by BrianTH; 04-14-2008 at 07:44 AM..
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Old 04-14-2008, 10:34 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,889,722 times
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As a followup, this person at Skyscraper put together a very nice (and representative) photo tour of Regent Square:

Pittsburgh Neighborhood Tours: Regent Square - SkyscraperPage Forum
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